1. Field
This disclosure is generally related to online reviews. More specifically, this disclosure is related to detecting bias in online reviews.
2. Related Art
Online retailers, such as Amazon.com Inc. of Seattle, Wash. and eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif., encourage their user-communities to contribute user reviews, including reviews to the products being sold or reviews to the associated sellers. User reviews are important to the online retailers because they attract customers, and thus can have a positive impact on the number of sales.
However, in order for the user reviews to work properly, the user-communities often need to be monitored. Without proper supervision, there is a risk that the value of the review content will be diluted by biased or otherwise erroneous posts. For example, positive reviews are sometime written by the businesses or individuals being reviewed, while negative reviews may be written by competitors, disgruntled employees, or anyone with a grudge against the business being reviewed. To monitor online user reviews, one popular approach is to rely on the self-regulation of the user-community in the form of ratings and comments. For example, Amazon.com provides a feature for a reader of a product review to indicate whether the review was helpful. The ratings of the reviews are generally based on the content of the associated reviews, and possibly, the reviewer's review history in the community, as this is often the only information that is readily available to the user community. Thus, the self-regulation system as it commonly exists today does not support the discovery of information external to the user community, such as the ties between a reviewer and the business to be reviewed. Such information can be valuable when detecting a potential bias on the part of the reviewer.